Stress

In languages with word accent or stress, some syllable in the word is particularly prominent – in loudness, length, pitch, pitch-movement, or any combination. In most English dialects stressed syllables are marked by relatively greater loudness and length, higher pitch or more pitch-movement than unstressed ones. In some languages stress always falls on the same syllable in the word (the first in Finnish, the penult in Polish, the final in Persian). Others, like English, are more complex; in this case due to partial morphological conditioning and the competition over centuries of native and foreign accentuation.

On the surface, ModE stress looks ‘free’: primary word accent can apparently fall on the first syllable (kettle´, character´), the second (bel´ıeve, div´ıde), or the third (viol´ın, anthropology´). Morphology is involved as well: some suffixes do not affect word stress, while others attract it (bel´ıeve/bel´ıev-er vs photograph/´ photograph´-y/photograph´-ic). Looking at stress patterns from the right wordedge rather than the left, we find stress final (viol´ın), penultimate (photographic´) and antepenultimate (photography´). Here a regularity does surface: the main word accent normally cannot appear more than three syllables from the end. In a rather constricted nutshell, English stress starts out ‘left-handed’: the location of stress is computed from the beginning of the word. But through massive contact with a language of a very different type, English has also incorporated a ‘right-handed’ system, calculated from the word-end. The two types have been in competition since Middle English times; neither side has won or is likely to. Despite decades of attempts to define ‘stress rules’ for English, it is probably safe to say that it has none, but a set of competing (rather loose) patterns.

There are also patterns involving secondary stress (here marked by`): words of four syllables or more typically have two accented syllables (anthrop`ology´, anthropol`ogical´, d´ıctionary`). Above the level of the single word, primary and secondary stress may be sensitive to grammatical structure: a compound word like blackbird is left-strong, but a phrase like black bird is right-strong.

In this chapter, morphology = inflection. That is, attachment to the edges of (or in some cases insertion into) lexical morphemes of markers that code categories or track grammatical relations. Very little of earlier English inflectional morphology remains; it now has a minimal relic system.

(a) Case. ModE nouns are invariant, except for an apparent genitive (cat vs cat’s, cats’). If we define an inflectional affix as a marker attaching to a word, then this is not a case marker but a clitic which marks its host as a possessive modifier. The s-genitive can attach not only to words (as above), but to phrases and clauses: in [[cat]’s] it looks like an affix, but in [[the king of England]’s nose] -s attaches at phrase level, and in [[the man who lives next door]’s brother] at clause level.

True case marking remains only in the pronoun: aside from the modifying genitive (my book, your dog), there is only a two-way contrast, nominative vs